Seek My Face

Rating:
Summary: A cozy book for a crazy age
Review: Updike creates a mock interview in an old Vermont house/artist's studio. The interviewer is a contemporary Manhattanite new journalism styled reporter; the artist, a 79-year-old woman who was married to a thinly disguised Jackson Pollack (here named Zack). There is a coherence in the artist's reminiscences--a coalescence between nostalgia for an important and radical age in contemporary art, a quasi-memoir of intense life and living among the Abstract Expressionists and their contemporaries; and a meditation on aging. The title of the book is Biblical, and One gets the feeling from the artist that the age of art in the 40' through 60's was in a way antedulvian, that is of a time before the flood of media that have made images overwhelming and prepackaged, and has squeezed celebrity out of the most unimpressive, dispassionate "personalities." Updike's tenor--using his interviewee as an alter ego--reminds me of the tone of sport's books that mourn for the times when "the game really "mattered." Updike does know his art and the descriptions and analyses of various artists and paintings and milieu in the book are more prescient and enjoyable than the vacuous stuff you will find in most art magazines. If you are not familiar with the world of the book, however, i.e., Barnet Newman, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hoffman, Clement Greenberg, Frank O'hara, Franz Kline, etc., you will not be able to literally picture much of the subject matter. The writing is very competent as is usual for John Updike, and I certainly enjoyed this more than the bloated Rabbit at Rest, which should have been lain to rest in the previous installment of the Rabbit series. I'm not quite sure why some people put down Updike, but for my money, he's better than most fiction writers of his generation or the 30/40 something crowd. And if you are going to pick between reading this book, and the movie "Pollack," despite the film's valiant attempt, it's not even close in merit. Additionally, one person here was surprised that a 79 year old woman would be so open about sexuality, but the art world during the 40's and 50's was not exactly inhabited by feminine prudes.

Rating:
Summary: An extraordinary book
Review: Updike writes superbly about art -- not only the experience of seeing art but the business of art and, most interesting to me, the creative process. I was not surprised to read that he had spent a stint as an art student. This is truly a book about art, artists, and the role they play in society. He tackles this difficult topic without resorting to critics' jargon or dry exposition. The character of Hope is rendered in beautiful detail which is all the more astonishing for its insights into the female psyche. While I agree with the other reviewers that the character of Hope's second husband was too much of an amalgam to be credible, that was the only off note in an otherwise prodigious work, and the device did serve to flesh out the historical context. The ending offers an exquisite little vignette which, not wanting to spoil, I will just say was one of the most memorable literary passages I have encountered in decades of reading popular fiction.